Undelete

This option is only available in Active Directory environments if you are browsing the Deleted Objects container. It opens the Object Undelete dialog so that you can reanimate/recover deleted Active Directory objects. For more detailed information about the object recovery in Active Directory, go to the topic Undeleting AD objects in this manual.

The undelete operation is performed for all objects which are selected in the LEX object list panel:

In this dialog, you can choose if you want to restore the deleted objects in their original or another container. If you choose to restore the object in their original container, LEX can restore these containers to if this should be necessary. After the undelete operation you see the results in a separated window:

The option Copy to Clipboard enables you to get a semicolon-separated result summary into the clipboard so that you can use this for documentation of the recovery operation.

The two modes for AD object recovery

The Deleted Objects container is in the root of each Active Directory partition. The tombstones are stored in this container to enable the replication of information about deleted objects to other domain controllers, even if they were not online for a while.

There are two differences possibilities to get deleted objects back:

Reanimation of deleted object tombstones: This is the 'old' method. You can get back a deleted object, but some important information is lost - like the group memberships and the according backlinks. You can recover objects only if they didn't exceed the Tombstone Lifetime which is a global constant (usually 180 days but can be changed by the AD forest administrator).

Recovery of deleted objects: This technique is available since Windows 2008 R2 - you need to activate the Active Directory Recycle Bin for this. This is an additional feature you can globally activate so that deleted objects are maintained in the Deleted Objects container with all the important attribute information - especially all their referential integrity (for example: group memberships). You can recover objects only if they didn't exceed the Deleted Object Lifetime which is a global constant (usually 180 days but can be changed by the AD forest administrator). After that time span, object will get the status 'recycled' - they are visible in the Deleted Objects container but they cannot be recovered or reanimated any more (they are only used internally for Ad replication then).